>>17742658
>none of them actually believes Thor is in the clouds throwing lightning bolts around.
There's certainly a lot of those who see the gods as just archetipes or alegories, but even if Ares is "just an archetype" but can still fuck you up if you don't behave, at what point do you "not believe"? If you believe a tiger will fuck you up, but can be kept at bay by offering it food or just putting distance between you and it, you still "believe" in the tiger. The idea that a God has to be this omnipresent boogeyman that will fuck you up over incredibly minor things that you can't even perceive is just simply not how historical pagans saw their Gods. It's not even how Christians historically saw their God. It's a weird strawman that Christians adopt in these debates, where they assume that if the non-Christian doesn't act Christian, then they're not "real". No shit non-Christians don't act Christian, they aren't Christian.

Aristotle's theology placed the Gods as the Prime Movers (plural, there's more than one) that move the planets in the sky. Does that mean that Aristotle doesn't "believe in Zeus" even though Zeus literally causes phenomena to occur, and can be interacted with? If so, then how is that any different from what Aquinas does? Are the angels, who he attributes to the Prime Movers, "not real"? Is God then "not real"?

This is to say nothing of the Stoics and Platonists, both of whom have a radically different idea of what constitutes the divine than "Chris Hemsworth running around doing stuff". And this doesn't even touch on the "Allegorists", such as Heraclitus (no relation to the Flux Master), who argued that yes, the Gods were essentially just Jungian archetypes

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Why can’t a new pagan religion be created ? I think the idea that religions are only legitimate if they were made up before the…